Once you have cannibalized a game for its dice or figures, play money or pawns, assume that those things will never make it back to the game they came from. They almost never do.

[...] in tabletop games [...] we are the interpreters and facilitators of the experience and the social context of that is impossible to replicate. We’re the ones that take the rules and convert them into mechanisms. We’re the compilers of fun – we take the instructions and execute them for the benefit of all.

Honestly, you can ignore at least half the rules of any RPG system. RPGs don’t have rules; they have guidelines. And 10 foot poles.

And that’s why we play board games right? For fun? If that’s what board game critics are to be judging then I think we need to seriously work out what we mean when we use that word. Our default mode is to let fun be a personal and visceral sort of thing. It’s not something you can define or get a hold of. You just feel it, and different people feel it for different reasons. If that’s the case, then board game criticism will probably remain what it is now—publicity and rules explanations.

When you compare the information contained in this game [A Distant Plain] and how it’s presented to the firehose of disjointed, contextless words and images that came out of coverage of the war in Afghanistan, you can see the potential contained within one of these games for someone to educate themselves on the complexities and nuances of this conflict.

Wargaming is really focused on the decisions that people make and the beliefs that underlie those decisions.

Let’s not talk about play as fun but as pleasurable, opening us to the immense variations of pleasure in this world.

Knowing the tensile strength of folded steel made by Vikings in the 10th century is not a good reason to add a rule to your game.